Bob Dylan Releases 17-Minute Song About JFK Assassination – New York Post

Bob Dylan Releases 17-Minute Song About JFK Assassination - New York Post thumbnail

For years, Bob Dylan fans have spoken in a kind of hushed awe about the longest tune he ever launched, “Highlands,” an album side-size 1997 song that ran 16 minutes and 31 seconds. Now, 23 years later, he’s honest a minute outdone himself. Because the clock struck midnight on the east soar Friday morning, Dylan launched a brand fresh tune, “Murder Most Infamous,” that has a 16: 57 running time — and it’s an tale free affiliation on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Minute recordsdata used to be given about the shock song, excluding for a temporary observation from Dylan himself:

“Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your enhance and loyalty through the years.

“Here is an unreleased tune we recorded a while help that it’s doubtless you’ll presumably get attention-grabbing.

“Preserve stable, pause observant and might presumably well presumably God be with you.

“Bob Dylan”

A Dylan representative acknowledged the observation used to be the total recordsdata they are going to be releasing about the tune, so whether “a while help” capacity a subject of months or decades remains a thriller.

Dylan’s final album of customary area cloth, “Tempest,” came out in 2012, even supposing he has launched three items of his interpretations of songs from the Sizable American Songbook in-between, the final of which used to be the triple-album “Triplicate” in three years previously. Rumors had been rampant that this year Dylan might presumably well very smartly be releasing his first album of self-penned songs in eight years, but there’s been no confirmation of that.

The lyrics of the wide song will fascinate Dylanologists who’ve waited years for one thing new to dissect, since there’s actually half of an album’s price of area cloth correct in one song here.

Now and then the lyrics converse actually of the Kennedy assassination, with a crooked against conspiratorial takes on the event, but as the tune goes along it breaks more freely true into a pop-culture fantasia.

Against a minimal mattress of violin, piano and light-weight percussion, Dylan frequently references or riffs on 1960s events, catchphrases or titles, with lines that encompass: “The Beatles are coming, they’e gonna purchase your hand” (the advent of the Fab Four in The United States in early 1964 is regarded by some as a tonic to the lingering dejected from the assassination); “ferry cross the Mersey and lunge for the throat” (most productive fragment of which is a nod to Gerry and the Pacemakers); “Tommy are you able to hear me, I’m the Acid Queen,” and “I’m going to Woodstock, it’s the Aquarian age / Then I’ll lunge to Altamont and stand conclude to the stage.”

Dylan doesn’t have his head fully in the ’60s: “Frankly Omit Scarlett, I don’t give a rattling” also comes up for a citation. And at final, so develop — going in the ’70s, and past and help — Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, the Allman Brothers Band’s Dickey Betts, “Most productive the Appropriate Die Young, “Nightmare on Elm Road,” Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Artwork Pepper, Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, “Charlie Parker and all that junk,” Nat King Cole, Marilyn Monroe, John Lee Hooker, Wolfman Jack, Patsy Cline, Houdini, “Wake Up Minute Suzy,” “Let the Appropriate Times Roll,” “The Susceptible Rugged Infamous,” “Down in the Boondocks,” “The Service provider of Venice,” “Memphis in June,” “Moonlight Sonata,” “Play Misty for Me,” “Lonely on the Top” and “Lonely Are the Fearless.”

Every so in most cases, Dylan straight marries his pop-culture references and the assassination, as when he sings, “You received me Dizzy Omit Lizzy, you win me with lead.” Or: “What’s fresh pussycat, what’d I divulge / I acknowledged the soul of a nation been torn away.”

In phrases of the real assassination, Dylan doesn’t skimp on the particulars: “They blew off his head while he used to be mute in the auto,” he sings in the well-known stanza. In a while, he traces the auto’s frantic exit away from Dealey Plaza in Dallas, even taking the well-known-individual level of stumble on of the deceased Kennedy: “Utilizing in the backseat next to my accomplice / And it’s straight on into the afterlife / I’m leaning to the left I received my head in her lap…” He gets explicit about particulars following the loss of life, too — love “Johnson sworn in at 2: 38.”

He also takes the level of stumble on of Kennedys assailant — or, in his stumble on, assailants — singing attractive lines love, “We’ve already received somebody here to purchase your dwelling,” or, of Kennedy’s brothers, “we’ll get hold of them as smartly.”

In the tune’s stumble on, the killing of JFK, “dependable there in entrance of everyone’s eyes,” is the “greatest magic trick” — and one he presumably thinks has some relevance in 2020.

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